Ephelyon

It's the fines that are a good point there too. The school may not be able to afford them and have to suspend operations for that reason, though of course in practice it's far more likely that the LEA would have to pay them on its behalf (though what happens with academies there, I've no idea). Then again, if the LEA as the ultimate employer decides that various staff have caused it to have to spend silly amounts of money, it may simply fire them... so it's potentially game over for key staff (and possibly the NM too) either way.

So where do you draw a line that says "we're this far through the year now, it's not worth continuing for this academic year at least"? We'll do the restorative work, but alternative arrangements will need to be made for the pupils in the meantime.

What tends to happen is they all get farmed off to other local schools in clumps, in the same way as if a school burns down. True, it's a right ballache, but at the end of the day it's happened before and it gets dealt with. I'd agree that closing the school probably wouldn't be the most sensible choice (unless the incompetence was just one more incident in a long line at the school), but if it's a case of saying could it, in theory, be enough to have the school closed and/or people prosecuted? Well yes, it could.

But schools are required to do quite a few things legally that involve data. All schools are required to keep educational records for all pupils. All public organisations are also required to keep financial records for however many years it is now. If a school does not comply with rather major areas of the law, it can be closed. Besides, if you lose e.g. your progress tracking data, the education you can provide for existing cohorts will suffer significantly, to the extent that you probably couldn't "compete" as a school very well anyway, and the question of whether it's better to just "rip and replace" and start again with the school would arise. Then there's attendance. All schools are required to take and store a register, containing at a minimum this, for this long, with these provisions to be observed where computers are involved. If you lose this, the school has fallen foul of the law. It's anyone's guess whether a prosecution (of the LEA, Governing Body, Head etc) would actually ensue, considering the focus should be on getting things back up and running as soon as possible for the sake of the kids, but there should be no doubt that it certainly could. So in short I would say that none of the situations above should be considered in any way acceptable and their avoidance should be a top priority.

Personally, I'm struggling to see how a school that lost all that data wouldn't have to just close (and then re-open as a very different entity next September obviously).

Ah... when we have the technology to do memory transplants, I may require your brain. Then again, mine might then explode.

Lends a new meaning to the term "Clue Bat"...

Away From Keyboard tags?

1) Create a lockdown policy with the required settings; 2) Link it to the appropriate OU, but with a higher priority than the existing policy; 3) Change the security on the policy by removing "Authenticated Users" and adding just her user account.

You really are very bored today, aren't you?

If you don't have complex infrastructure requirements - and it sounds like you don't - you could look at the free Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 offering. The hypervisor itself is free (only paying for guest server OS licenses, not much under EES). Backup is cheap at £331.50 for Altaro (including the educational discount) per host. We're an ESXi shop here for our main platform but Hyper-V Server is doing a fine job hosting about ten programming VMs for the students on a box with 12 cores and 64GB RAM. You can pick up some cheap refurb hardware for the job from Refurbished Servers - Desktop PCs - Workstations | bargain hardware or through @ICTDirect_Dave.

Okay, I've now given both the IIS and SIMS VMs 4 cores and 16GB RAM each... and PARS Connect running with about 15 users today was unable to log some of them on (freeze during login or "can't connect to SQL server") randomly (worked the next time they tried). I'm now getting very worried about the potential performance implications when everyone tries to use it in the morning from tomorrow. Apparently the "recommended spec" for PARS Connect is 8 cores and 32GB RAM - is it just me or is that massively inefficient?! Anyone got any performance tips for SQL/IIS to see where the problem might be?

Not for that, though we do script it for automatically encrypting staff laptops.

Yes, they quite possibly would. And you're welcome!

EntraPass for number 5 perhaps? And Microsoft Dynamics GP for number 2?

If it's a domain machine and you're a domain admin (or even just a local admin), you can switch to their session and log off from there by running TSCon as LocalSystem.

Right, this is now sorted, thanks to all for the help offered. And what did Capita say? Try running the mapping on the server instead of a workstation. It worked first time! But... I didn't have to do that last year, or with PM registration this year, and my workstation isn't the only one I've tried it on... wha?!

Unfortunately we don't have those menus! This is the screen I mean. Pressing Map Forward doesn't do anything and even setting all the AM ones manually won't be saved once it's closed:

I've asked County to contact Capita. We now have one day in which to have them do so and for Capita to respond with a solution (assuming it's as simple as "oh yes, this is what you do"). Which it won't be.

Afternoon all... I'm having a very serious issue with SIMS if anyone knows what could be up with it. We've previously had the AM attendance session mapped to morning registration and the PM session mapped to Period 4. We've now changed the school day and need AM to map to Period 1 and PM to map to Period 5. There's a Form Time period after Period 5 but it's not used for registration. We're having to do it the "Tools > Setups > Attendance Setup > Registration Organisation" way because that's how PARS integrates with it. We don't have Lesson Monitor. Mapping the PM session to Period 5 is working fine... but the AM session will not map to Period 1! Nothing happens when I press the Map Forward button; it doesn't populate down the list. I've even tried setting every single one manually and saving, but when it re-opens the mapping isn't there and PARS doesn't show it as mapped either. I really can't work out what could be causing the one to work but not the other! County Support don't know either. All I do know is, if it's not in place and working for Tuesday morning, a Great Doom will settle over us as we won't have any AM attendance data until it's fixed... :/

I don't know... I'm reminded of Peter Davison's performance when I look at Capaldi (thus far). The Fifth Doctor could be indecisive and vulnerable too, though I suppose in quite a different way. I remember I did think exactly the same thing about tonight's episode while it was airing though. But look at the Doctor now. I suppose an earlier incarnation of him would know he's got a good few lives left, but ultimately there's a set number of them. Whatever you're going to do in your time, there's a limit on how long you'll be around - just as in real life, mortality probably keeps us from adopting a lot of silly attitudes. I think as we get older we base a lot of our morals on "what we'll have done with our life", which inherently assumes a limit on how long it lasts. But at the end of the last season the Doctor was given a new cycle of regenerations, almost implying that if something like that could be given freely (in theory), Time Lords could be immortal as long as nothing "kills them properly", i.e. in a way that regeneration can't cure, or before it completes. I think it's reasonable that he'd be suffering an existential crisis right now; however conflicted he'd been before about whether (over 12 regenerations) he was Good, now he has to deal with potentially the same lifespan all over again. By Matt Smith's last episode he was old and had accepted he was old, and that this was his last face and his last achievement (protecting the town of Christmas). If, as a venerable 90-year-old who'd already accepted there were fewer years ahead than there are behind, you were suddenly told that you had another 90 ahead of you now... how would that affect the way you took stock of your life, your priorities, your achievements (in context), your view of yourself? I think something like that could be in the works for the Doctor, personality-wise, and if he needs to lean on Clara for a bit... well, I suppose we all would. And, to be fair to the character, she does it well.

Ah, cheers for that, I've not seen that series. Maybe the Doctor has made that link himself and is remembering it?

Having just watched tonight's episode of Doctor Who, something occurred to me during my cig afterwards (yes, I should stop). The plot revolves around the idea of a Good Dalek (note the caps); this being a Dalek who is morally good - and also their equivalent of a misanthropist apparently! - as opposed to a "good Dalek"; this being a ruthless, hateful exterminator. At the end, it says it is not a good/Good Dalek, but the Doctor is. I wonder how it would have written the sentence. Is it saying the Doctor would be a "good Dalek", or is it trying to say that the Doctor is a "Good Dalek"? This being someone who has exterminated on a grand scale (Daleks, Time Lords etc) but who is in fact morally good, and even carried out those exterminations on that basis, rightly or wrongly. I imagine the script intended the former, but I thought the latter could be an interesting idea since the Dalek has after all been inside the Doctor's mind and knows his history; it seems like it would be more in keeping with his character over the decades. Also, the Twelfth Doctor seems a bit depressed so far. Maybe if he worked out later on in the series that it was trying to tell him he was a "Good Dalek" - that being something he was so keen to see come into the universe - he'd feel a little better. What do we think?

We've got a separate Hyper-V host set up for this now. All VMs are set to revert to checkpoint every midnight and will auto-start every 5 minutes if they are accidentally shut down. Students have full admin access to them but no Internet access from them. They connect over WFreeRDP in VM Mode. Doing it this way means you need a spare host (pick a refurbished one up for cheap from Bargain Hardware perhaps), but eliminates the need for each workstation to be of sufficient spec to run the VMs themselves.

I've recently come up with a Hyper-V based solution for this if you've a spare host and would like any more details.